For esports, and for Quake. A bold title for a column maybe, but it is what I feel after this last DreamHack Winter 2011.

The first argument is that the esport crusade, that began twelve years ago and has always been surrounded by doubts, has finally settled foot on a strong ground. StarCraft 2 – the champion and main force of the army – is there not only to survive, but to grow and conquer. And it is not just excitement we are talking about. We now have better business models, we have game developers actively financing events and supporting esport, we have streams reaching important numbers, and organizations benefiting from improved infrastructure. We hear people like Carmac talking about synergistic interaction among the organizations, and more importantly, it seems that the people involved in esports are finally learning how to make sustainable efforts, after the numerous failures of this past decade. Another reason to have faith? All of this is happening during a harsh economic crisis, when conservative and careful thinking are mandatory for any investment. If something grows in these conditions, it means it has a good foundation.

Wait, I thought Quake was dying!

I hate this sentence. Not because I want to escape any reality behind it, but because it has no practical meaning. It is the human nature to witness death but still fight ‘till the end, and it should be obvious to everybody how nonsensical it is to choose not to live because of our fear of death. Simply put, I am mortal therefore I am dying, but I try not to give a fuck. Philosophy aside, “Quake is dying” is a dead-end for our minds; it cuts out opportunities and intelligent thinking, which are the things we actually need the most.
This past Saturday, 40k people saw a Quake final. It was not the perfect final (the mouse failure delay, the 3-0 that left us a bit empty-handed, the dominant SC2 audience, etc) but it was - arguably - the biggest exposure competitive Quake ever had. How? Just by cleverly interleaving the schedule, a simple but powerful decision.

Do those 40k viewers solve the problem Quake Live has? No! So why are you in any way happy?

I’m happy because – goodbye, writing style - Quake is fucking awesome. Old news, maybe, but it is the whole point of our community, of our crippled ESR, and of that part of our lives we spend playing, watching or thinking about Quake. It is an awesome experience. And most importantly, it can be an awesome experience also for those who are not Quake oriented, yet.

One of the nice things about cross-gender (FPS vs. RTS) interactions, is that the blatant difference in the gameplay allows people to drop the “mine is bigger” mindset, and allows a clearer, less-biased view to appreciate what is there. It is somehow funny that we needed CS to be “as dying as Quake” to finally have a mature reaction to it (which is either ignore it, or - for few rare individuals - appreciate it). Anyways, we live this very fortunate situation where the Quake and StarCraft communities seem to like each other. In an internet sense, of course, which means we don’t insult each other too often, nor slur the opposite games too much… :p

Now why is that important? Because they are the “next-gen” spectators competitive Quake can aim for. We no longer talk about Quakers (already oriented), but rather a mass of gamers and esport enthusiasts with little first-hand experience in FPS. They don’t know about all the underground shit, fights, debates, missing resources, id software’s hate or whatever. Still each one of them counts: in the stream counter, as potential new player, as positive judgment that can spread the word. The thinking from there is simple. Allow me a stretch: gamers are grown adult, some already with kids. Do you think so many kids would start playing soccer or baseball if they never saw these sport on tv? This might not be the reality today or tomorrow, but esport AND Quake survived a decade, so these time scopes are not that ridiculous.

This mass of spectators is a challenge and a relief, with big potential benefit for our game and community. For the productions and casters, it means to be able to entertain a broader audience, give that kind of information they need and like. This gives strength to the need for better spectator support (fixing the bugs, and adding some key features), which we all would benefit from. [Insert rage against id software here]. True, but when the evil SyncError sets the priorities to stuff like “allowing tier-slumming in NA servers”, an item like “improve spectator HUD” might receive a few additional points if one knows there is a big event with thousands of non-Quakers viewers ;)
Another advantage is that SC2 streams set standards, with which we would have to cope. A gimmick like showing the player’s heartbeat might sound silly at start, but it goes in the direction where if you give a good caster bits and pieces of information, he will have a base to spice his casting, making it more interesting and fun for everybody.
Third, if SC2 people start liking Quake, we are more likely to see Quake at important events. Think of the delusion after IEM dropped Quake, to understand how important this is for us all.

Ok but Quake still has lots of problems.

I won’t deny this. I just think we have to embrace what gaming is today and present Quake at its best. Drop anything we cannot control, and play with what we can. To me our priorities as competitive community are:

- Improve ESR, both as what the site features and how the people use it. There have been discussions about this, and hopefully this gets expanded in the comments. My take is that this place could look and feel much better.
- Improve the tournaments formats. I liked rapha’s points of having a 2on2 TDM rather than 4on4 and for duel to cycle more among the available maps. I also liked the map round system in the last SK tournament, which would allow to actually see all maps in the pool. The community should discuss, and tournament organizers take actions.
- I’m happy to see that more people started producing commentary videos. These should keep coming and improve. Moreover, good players should start streaming while playing. There are technical challenges, but with some efforts solutions can be found.
- Discussing the game. It would be nice to start seeing the kind of tutoring support one sees on team liquid, where one posts the demo of a match and asks for the mistakes. Posting a youtube video of the match might help getting lazy people to reply.

To conclude, let me give the proper respect to all the people who spent time, energy and money to make this last event happen. Level Up TV, 2GD, the players that attended even if they had little chance to win, the admin that decided to keep Quake at DH, xou who always does an amazing coverage work, and all people who woke up early and stayed up late to follow the streams, cheer, and make the IRC chat the funny spamfest it always is. Quake is awesome.

You know how most people complain that game X is on while they have to wait for Quake, but still watch the stream? That's what most of those SC2 viewers were probably feeling. They were probably alt+tabbed, just waiting to hear "STARCRAFT" so they could switch back.

While it's true that Starcraft 2 is paving the way for a great foundation, look at it a bit more realistically. Let's look at the next big game, for example. CS is still bleeding players, and losing tournaments. It's still FAR more popular than Quake, and still can't reap the benefits of the market that SC2 has opened up. What exactly do you expect that Quake can do, that CS couldn't?

You don't build a game from the tournament down, you build it from the players up. If you can't get people to play/watch on the merits of the game, you're never going to have any success.

but 40,000 quakers watched the ql final though? or is memento mori systematically keeping the most important piece of info out on purpose; That 37,000 of those 40,000 were sc2 fans simply waiting for the sc2 final?

You know how most people complain that game X is on while they have to wait for Quake, but still watch the stream? That's what most of those SC2 viewers were probably feeling.

/r/starcraft had 3 positive posts posts about ql on their frontpage right after the final and the comments on tl were really positive aswell (though i dont know how many negative they deleted). no other game gets embraced like that from other communities from what i have seen so far.

but as good as this synergy for multi game events might be, you are still totally right:

You don't build a game from the tournament down, you build it from the players up. If you can't get people to play/watch on the merits of the game, you're never going to have any success.

This is hardly an embrace. Even /r/gaming commonly has love for Quake, but most people will drop a passing "Yeah, Quake is cool.", and never actually play/watch the game. TL is a slightly better example, but there are threads and embrace for almost every game that comes out, and they are proportional in embrace to the general popularity of the game.

those are two of the threads i was talking about, but you should not judge them by the title, the support in the comments and simply judging by the upvotes is more than i see for any other game.

MrBound (_) 88 Punkte 2 Tagen von (94|7)

I watched a Quake cast djWHEAT did the other week. Prediction shots, timing powerup respawns in your head, knowing which weapon to use and when, movement and positioning...
I was pretty much blown away by how much strategy there is, and how high the game's skill cap is.

djWHEAT (_) 167 Punkte 2 Tagen von (181|15)

So via that little exposure are you excited for the Finals that's about to begin?

How is that counted though? CS had about 7-8 streams, most run completely independantly of the event organisers, covering 4 languages at least. So unless the numbers include the counts for all of those streams it's not a fair comparison to a single Quake stream.

dota 2 teams at dreamhack(with all due respect) weren't exactly close to being top10 tbh, past month have been 2 bigger tournaments in asia(not sure how many viewers on stream or whatever) but seemingly the game is alot bigger in Asia then it is here(talking about dota now)

I saw that there were more than 5,000 viewers at the same time, and there were maybe even more since I didn't see all 5 streams when cooller's QF match was on but russian streams (2) had more than 2,000 combined.

also note that the event links were at quakelive.com for the first time (excluding quakecon).
Even though last event there were also 5,000 viewers, that contributes to those good numbers.

My only suggestion is that stream links should be available like in LoL: an image that looks like the stream (not embed), click it and you'll end in twitch.tv. It is in the game's frontend for the whole weekend, in the middle of the screen.

these are the total views of the said channels.
Numbers are reliable because all were created for the event, and that's also why I can't count HoN total viewers properly (they used a channel created in late 2009)

Total live viewers count is not available, but we all saw that QL had more than cs and dota2.

Also consider that the current concurrent viewers record was made in a LoL stream, with 200,000 (note that following events were not close to that number), and I didn't search sc2 and ssf4 so we don't get depressed (or mlg or wcg for that matter).

how can you be so gullible. They were simply waiting for sc2 man... are you kidding me right now? it's nice to promote your favorite game but to try to elevate it past lol and cs, etc is just ridiculous.... There aren't even 40,000 active quake live players lol, seriously get a grip rofl

QL streams (5) combined had more than 5,000 at group stage, dota2 (1) had 3,000 at the second semifinal. CS (6 streams) was closer to QL, and even though QL still had more viewers CS destroys it in total viewers (lots of people watching vods).

does liveql.com (nsx.cx) have an updated list of streams?
I always find rather sad that it's rare to see someone streaming quake. Maybe the list is not updated with all the local communities.

on that note, the site should have a list of every quake live community, both national and international, for example quakelive.com/forum, esr, and in my case ciberdeportes.net (chile. There's a stream that's already on the list, on going tournaments and we had a major lan this year) and nrggames.com (argentina)

That could be expanded further with links to every site that is quake live related (tournaments, news, qlranks, qlprism and streamer-s websites for instance), youtube channels and to every site who contributes something.

That's quite optimistic, I also wish id Software might learn something from Blizzard. I don't know if they are really happy with Rage or not, but it's quite possible id Software is being foolish by not sticking closer to its roots, and instead of understanding its place and heritage, and advancing this niche, it is chasing after seemingly easier bait, which is turning out to be just soul poison. Personally, I would much rather play Serious Sam 3 than Rage.

when the evil SyncError sets the priorities to stuff like “allowing tier-slumming in NA servers”, an item like “improve spectator HUD” might receive a few additional points if one knows there is a big event with thousands of non-Quakers viewers ;)

it's nice you don't care about pubs and i understand syncerror, sponge and co dont' either but the pubscene is your only hope for growing this game. If you don't understand that concept by now then you'll never understand why quake is failing to retain players.

That whole sentence above sounds very elitist to me and doesn't serve anyone but the elites who would want sync to focus on competitive features, which he's already been doing for 3 years now. At what point will you realize that something in the machine has to change and new priorities have to be set? Focusing all the attention on the 1% of this community that plays competitively is like cutting high school football out of the equation and hoping kids make it from the peewee leagues (pub servers) to the pros without any assistance. You can't single out one usergroup for this equation to work. You need the pubs to keep things going for nothing more than player retention and future interest, whether it be in ql or a future remdition of the game.

What I picture is QL being an esport game, not a casual game. Is that even possible? Maybe yes.

While I would like to see masses of casuals picking up QL over COD or BF3, that stopped being realistic a while ago. Whatever the reasons (lack of advertisement by id/zenimax, a shift in what the gamers want today, the presence of other shooters better suited for casual gaming) it has not worked. I still think we can (and must) do a lot as community to make newbies feel better, but that is marginal to the discussion here.

The point is: why pretending to sell quake as casual game, when it is not? Give it a try was certainly worth it, and actually more efforts and cleverer management may have produced better results. However, casual seem not to be the right niche.

The mass of esport fan is growing. It is no way near to the mass of casual gamers, but is still growng. Within esport one can present Quake in its most brilliant form. It is the casting of 2gd that brought me into QL, the one of tasteless into sc:bw, and day9 into sc2. I played those games online because I was inspired by the esport scene.

One could easily argue that the dota-clones have experienced massive succes in the line of that of SC2. A following which is predicted to become even greater with dota2, due to the extreme amounts of chinese players which will probably switch to the new title.

I agree about DOTA2, but it is a great synergy of casual and competitive. MOBA games have been popular in casual circles, but have yet to get as big as SC/SC2. I think DOTA2 could do it, especially with Valve behind the wheel, but we'll have to wait and see.

The good answer (reinventing the game and still keeping it as depth) seems like a difficult task. I dont really get it tho. The name "Quake" is a new thing to most 13 year olds of today, who did and are growing up with slow, console FPS realistic games. If they suddendly stumbled into Quake 3 it would be a new thing for them, if you get the idea. I still think we are lacking the proper massive advertisment campaings that games like the COD series have.

Quake 4 and ET:QW were fully advertised - TV, internet, magazines, interviews, Quakecon, social networks, etc.. QL was at the top of reddit and digg for days, so it's not like it didn't have any advertising - minecraft managed millions of sales through reddit alone. "New" doesn't mean that they'll like it. Quake just doesn't have mass appeal, and the name alone has been damaged by multiple failures.

After getting into the League of Legends community, it's definitely made me realize a few things about Quake, good and bad.

Yes, Quake had a good amount if viewers for the DH final, but because a lot of sc2 players were waiting for the finals. Now, I have no issue with that, but people like MLG do. They split streams for every game, so they like to look at numbers with no question of "well were these viewers waiting for another game to be shown?". If you had just a Quake stream on MLG, I might admit it would do alright, but out of every game, it's probably going to be the least viewed game. Quake can stick around with tournaments like DH, but when it comes to other methods of organizing and streaming tournaments, I think Quake falls short.

Another aspect is the web community. All Quake really has is the QL forums, and ESR. It might sound harsh, but ESR doesn't really help the Quake community. If we're talking about just a news site, then it does, but as an actual Quake community, I think it just hurts it. In other games, if a website is too extreme in one way or another (too serious, too casual, etc), there's always alternatives. There isn't with Quake. It's either you deal with the trolls, assholes, and elitists, or you don't. There's no other site to go to. This is all we really have, which is why I'm in favor for the more strict moderation here. They should of started that years ago, one of my biggest complaints on this site was that anything and everything could be posted, and not get deleted. It can discourage new users, and keep them away.

Quake doesn't bring a lot of content either. If you want content, this is once again the only site that really offers anything. Some news, some demos, that's really about it. With other games, you always have top players streaming games, you can read tons of guides from other top players, get more news, watch more tournaments, etc.

I'd say the game itself holds back new users too. It's great that Quake Live is free, but there's literally zero incentive to keep a player playing. No ranks, no unlocks, and the only extra content is from giving them money. Prem/Pro splits the community further, a community that struggles to keep people already, and gives new users nothing to hold onto.

I think people are trying to bring Quake to an unrealistic position in e-sports too. You have to go by demand, if not a lot of people are watching, it's silly to spend tons of money promoting it, and keeping it in their eyes. A lot of people here just love Quake, and thinks everyone else should too. There's a lot of delusional people that think Quake could be as big as SC2, and it just never will. It doesn't matter how well you sell it and promote it, people are going to watch what they like and love. You can't force people into watching Quake.

The state of the game right now is so stale too. Look at the NA duel scene, most good players aren't playing at all. I feel bad for Shane, knowing he has probably the worst practice partners out of any region. With people like czm, dahang, dkt, chance, etc not playing, it's tough to practice. But there's a reason those players aren't playing. It's the same people over and over playing, the same trolls, the same maps, the same bullshit.

Personally for me, I got into this game because I wanted to compete in lots of tournaments and play. But as the years went on, that became less and less possible. All these events turned invite only, and even though I could of went to events like DH and Qcon, I couldn't, because it was invite only. That's one thing that's going to have to change too. We need open events. If a player wants to compete and go to events, let him. Look at UGC, great fun event, and an unlikely hero was born. There's no interesting upsets with the same top 16 playing. It gets very stale, very quickly. It's probably the most frustrating thing to me. I want to go to events and play, but no. You're not a top tier player, we want nothing to do with you. The easy response to this is obviously "get better", but this instantly discourages a lot of people who would want to play in these events. If a player knows he has to play a game for three years just to be able to ATTEND a lan event, you can't realistically think these players are going to do that.

Quite frankly I see very little Quake Live could do to keep it going. Sure there's always going be some demand, but realistically there's just a lot more better options for games than Quake. I think a Quake 5 could revive the scene a bit, bring more viewers and players, IF it's done right. It needs to be done the correct way. No waiting two years for patches to get it to a playable competitive state. No waiting six months before bringing decent features into it. It needs to be solid, on release. And if it's not solid, it needs to be damn near close.

Quake enthusiasts just need to understand where Quake belongs. It's not a top tier e-sport game, it CAN be, but the demand isn't there. I HOPE it keeps going, I'd love to keep playing the game.

As long as people insist on QL beeing the future of Quake (or q5) we are doomed. It was pretty obvious from day 1 that QL was targeting the casual gamer (and it doesn't do too bad at that it seems) because that's where the money (for id) is.

The oh-so-dead Q3 had 5 ESWC stops in 2008, Gamesgune, DH IIRC, 3-4 ASUS Cups and all of them were proper LANs. Even some qualifiers where LANs.
And look where the hopping on the QL-unite-Quake!!1 bandwagon took us?

There are plenty of Q3 variants to choose from, be it OSP, VQ3, CQ3, CPM or the new edawn. All of them are technically in a far superior state then QL, especially when it comes to competition. QL is not suited for competitive use and never was supposed to be, why would id care about those 1% of the player population?. Up to this day you can't even vote the timelimit.

For tournaments Q3 should have been used from day 1 (in QL timeline). New players convinced by streams can be send to QL for the start. No real new player would see any difference between QL and whatever Q3 mod anyhow.

I agree with what you wrote but I also think Quake Live needs to be upgraded before we can "sell" it to the other gaming communities. We need iD Software to fix the bugs and add all the major things we all want like anti cheating etc. before we can do it.

Improving ESR, putting together a proper wiki, gathering the existing guides & tutorial, setting up a decent support area where the game is discussed... these are all things that do not require id Software.

Ok ok, I wouldn't mind helping with a wiki for Quake Live akin to liquidpedia. So do we make up a whole new one or do we use one of the existing ones? We can put up proper articles for all the pro players and links to all the their best games etc. and have tutorials etc.

There have been different attempts over the past to make Quake Live wikies. We need to scout for them, contact the owners, and then agree on a centralized wiki place. I really would like it integrate to ESR somehow.

Once that is in place, a few good souls should make some serious thinking to put down a proper initial skeleton, inserting the existing content, and creating templates for skeleton items. Lurking TeamLiquid may give good hints.

I went to a couple of underground lans in Lausanne during 1999-2000 (was playing HLDM atm), went to a big one in Bern at the Schweizerhoff (2001?) and then to the airlan at the airport in Genevra (2002?). Then I got to school, and just participated to a fun university lan in Zurich (2007?).

hahahha, actually a similar to PK jump system would prolly benefit in some new players... strafe jumping is simple stupid and tricky to learn for newbies... just pressing space to gain speed would kill a bit of quake spirit, but i guess its better than having almost none new players

It's not the amount of players that makes the tournaments happen, it is the amount of viewers. Not to mention that viewers are potential players.

The warm reception by the SC2-community also means that I believe a QL tournament next DH may be very likely as the format they used now worked extremely well (having the QL-finals in the middle of SC2).

that makes very good reading. i especially liked how shocked some of the guys on the forum were when the smaller details were explained. timing upwards of 4-5 items in head, pixel rails, rocket jumps, telefrags, map prediction, etc, etc. i think compared to most players of other games - s2 players tend to appreciate the skill level in quake a whole lot more. and just reading through those comments reinforces the fact that we love and play the absolute best shit ever.

He actually does that kind of shit sometimes - it's really weird to ping 100ms less than someone and not being able to pick anything up for a few minutes, makes you reconsider mg whoring as a valid tactic.

New players get raped in QL + there is only a handful of players dominating everything who wont be challenged in the next 3-5 years. As long as that doesn't change I personally don't see a bright future for Quake Live. But we can have nice tournaments with the same top16 duel players ofc.

First and foremost, Quake needs to groom and take care of it's newbies, then expand the specturm of top tier players (by which i mean give more incentive to people who are aaaaaaalmost at the very top level, but aren't very interested in going that extra mile to reach it).

Too many people are being turned off by the rude behaviour of veteran players, and simply by getting destroyed game after game. A game with a learning curve as steep as Quakes can't afford to box in it's newbies with experienced players who make mincemeat out of them. It might have worked in the past, where the general gamer mentality was more focused and persistent, but today's gamers generally get turned off by a seemingly insurmountable challenge. And don't kid yourselves, that's exactly how QL looks like to a completely new player. At it's current state, it gives zero favours to newbies, tiers are a nice idea but their implementation is really bad, especially for duel.

There are some very basic things that are wrong and broken with QL, and the game won't progress forward when it's crippled. It's in id's hands to do something about it. We all know what needs to be done, and they should fucking know that as well. The question is, are we, by this time, past the point of no return?

On top of that, i'm really fucking pissed at how it's always in the hands of the community and people other than id to push QL forward.

Quake games were always somewhat reliant on the community to provide content, improved clients and functionality, but with QL, id has taken the game into it's own hands, put it in a centralized frame and said "Chill out motherfuckers, we got dis". They have given zero power to the community to make a difference. And yet it has still done more for the game than they did. Anyone else thinks there's something wrong with that? Fucksakes.

Quake games were always somewhat reliant on the community to provide content, improved clients and functionality, but with QL, id has taken the game into it's own hands, put it in a centralized frame and said "Chill out motherfuckers, we got dis". They have given zero power to the community to make a difference. And yet it has still done more for the game than they did. Anyone else thinks there's something wrong with that? Fucksakes.

I have to agree with this, I've been thinking about it a lot. The only thing QuakeLive got to offer compared to what you had already with q3/cpma is that the game content is a free download.

Ever since QuakeWorld, it has been up to the community to create the match tools needed for online play, atleast for competitive online play - It's like id spits out a new Quake and says "Here you go, it got FFA... you guys will fix the rest right?"

However this time that is not even possible... I wish that id software would just acknowledge that they are not ever going to bring the features needed to make QuakeLive a solid game, and then just give up their in-house development. Instead they should sponsor the running cost as a way of catering to their fanbase for future game releases, and then hand over the development to the community.

I'm not saying they should make QuakeLive opensource, that probably won't work with the way it's set up, but there are plenty of qualified people who would happily donate their free time to coding QuakeLive - All id software has to do is give them the option to do so!

Well said. QL could have been so much more if only the community would have the power to improve it. It doesn't make any sense - there are people out there who would code this thing for free. Maybe it's a pride thing for id, i don't know.

Nah, it's just that they thought they could make money through advertising, and for that to work, they obviously had to have complete control over their platform (advertisement, not the glorious resurrection of deathmatch games, was the point of QL in the first place). That obviously didn't work out, and they're stuck with something they run at a loss which only keeps existing because dumping it would be bad PR.
Making it open to modders and such would only be a (legal, technical, whatever) hassle for them for pretty much no benefit as the only people who would care are the existing players, which they are not making enough money from already.
The best thing that could happen for id is that the player base suddenly gets bored and QL dies a quick and silent death.
I truly don't understand how most people here on ESR still fail to realize such obvious stuff.

I'd like a site similar to teamliquid for quakelive with more strict moderation and being able to have livestreams visible. Im willing to stream and commentate my own gameplay in zotac and practise ( I have done this to friends and other spectators who I have been in ts with before and they have been entertained by this ). One thing is that I play with 4:3 and viewsize 90 so the stream might look a bit funny :\ Not sure if I should set up an extra pc who follows me with a nicer config or if people simply want to see how it looks with my own. I like your coaching idea aswell memento mori. I really feel that we need a better platform than esr or this site needs a few updates and more strict mods - there is already a 4chan to fuck around on we don't need two.

Not sure how much he streamed but he says he got around ~3k viewers after some time that month. If I were him I'd stream all my games 24/7 with that income but you don't see him actively streaming that much, for some reason. Days with 0 income he obviously didn't stream anything.

There are people with much more than 3k viewers (even Destiny himself gets much more than that now), so if they stream some every day they can make some serious money. Especially if you consider the salary they get from their team, sponsor money and tournament winnings. Destiny also says he gets around $1500 per month from coaching.

if he streamed everyday, he might not actually rake in as many viewers. everyday streaming may drop the numbers as it becomes not so interesting to people. stream once in a blue moon, the contagiousness of OMG! HES STREAMING!!! AHJAHJAHAH! will make him get numbers that will make Stalin and Musslini roll over in their grave

I've given it some thought in the past and have tried to draw conclusions based on what I see and it seems that the more someone streams, the more people watch the stream. You'd expect what you write to be true, that people get tired of the guy if he streams every day. However, the more they watch a stream the more they seem to feel connected to that person, especially if he communicates with them.

It's sorta like football, if you are a fan of a team, you want to just watch them play, not a bunch of other guys. It should also be noted that just because you stream a lot, doesn't mean the viewers will have a lot of time to always watch your stream. I'm guessing here but I doubt the majority can even waste one hour a day on watching someones stream, regardless of how much he actually streams. So by streaming a lot you make it more accessable and at the same time increase your fan base.

Agreed. :) Used to watch LzGaMeRs stream in sc1 aloooooot, and you felt somewhat connected to him, he conversated greatly with the viewers in a relaxed kind of way which made you feel like a part of it. Awesome player too, was soo entertaining to watch.

anyway, look at this site.. you can't even tell what it is about.
it needs a big facelift ASAP!

and pro Quakers need to stop being so secluded (even from their core fanbase). stream some matches, get together with other players in bootcamps/mini-LANs and stream from there too!
get some twitter accounts so people can follow what you're up to etc.

I really think that IEM next season might/might not have Quake Live again because of the Popularity LOL, and SC2 has caused. and LOL has a Bad Community to begin with either, no wonder why the game hasn't been flooded with hackers yet. and Starcraft 2 just got to damn old, I don't even care about the damn game because it's lame to watch nobody what these Asians are doing.

In my Point of View If Id Software can do things right and try to change whatever stuff they have too, we can see a new Quake in the Future maybe possibly after Doom 4 or RAGE 2 (assuming that they do work on it). even John Carmack says that there is a possibility that a new Quake is being worked on the Id Tech 5 engine. As long as it becomes the Next Big Thing (like Call of Duty 4 was) Then we can see some more love out of Quake.

didnt read, but i [+] just because ur one of few optimistic guys here, who want to do some good, not to get girls&glory, but because doing is better than whining how ID and syncerror is bad [hi ray-gtfo-and-die-in-a-car-fire-thenoob]

TV ads. TV ads hyping the game and telling them it's awesome and you can make money traveling the world, with some metal (or dubstep now that it's trendy) in the background and some sick frags with full gfx on.

I've been told by a lot of people quake is the best esport for spectators and it contains the most action because non-quakers can see how much skill is involved, and people who don't play video games altogether are simply impressed by all the frags and speed of the gameplay.

I tend to agree, at all the lans I've been to where there's been other games up on the screen (cs mainly) and quake always gets the bigger reaction from the crowds.

IMO what goes through most peoples heads when they come across a quake stream is 'wow that's cool, i'll watch this for a bit.' But there's nothing keeping them wanting to come back, they might try to play a little and have a bit of fun but again, they don't stick around. They don't know the top players or want to follow their games through tournaments.

I haven't hopped on ESR for a long time, I am glad to see things still kicking.

Quake will always be a first love for me, in particular Q2 and Q3 1v1. Even though I haven't played for years, and the last online FPS gaming I did was in COD4, I will always love the game, always remember trying to get better, and enjoyed watching and occasionally playing the best.

The problem with quake, and with ql in particular... well, how are you going to get new players? Players are your fans.

Some opinions--

QL's graphics certainly aren't going to blow anybody away. You or I may not care (that was never the point), but new players certainly will.

I've always said that at it's best, quake is high speed chess. That's really what it is. The game seems simple (lacking the military realism, vehicles, world destructibility, etc, the gimmicks in the most popular online shooters today), but as anybody who plays/played the game seriously will tell you, it is not.

Given that, it is not friendly to the new player, I would bet that the people playing quake nowadays are predominately pretty serious players, and the prospects for a noob trying to find a fun, competitive game where they aren't getting totally housed has to be slim. I haven't played for years, but I'm guessing I'm right about this.

That's a problem, and it's been the problem since Q3 public servers died in popularity. Q4 didn't catch on as much because CS and it's military-styled ilk has snatched most of the new players up ever since Q3. Love it, hate it, but I don't think we can deny it.

So the new player, which is a pc player, which is already a minority, and often tends to be a player who likes the better graphic capabilities/flexibility/customization of pc gaming, is going to use their monster pc to run ql? I doubt it.

And as a spectator sport...it's a moot point. The game needs players, they will enjoy spectating the most. The action is way too fast for many non-players to even figure out what's really going on, they may say "wow", but the speed can be intimidating, certainly intimidating for anyone looking to pick up the game.

What you hope for is that certain types of players will get sick of the military style shooters, and maybe them and others will stumble upon ql, maybe stick with it, and a small, hardcore community will continue to survive.

This whole long post isn't to diss quake, as I said, when I hopped on here, it was good to see things still going here. But if you want to help the game, I would say that it needs to be as easier/ appealing as possible for new players. That's a tough order to fill at this point.

I definitely feel you on this and it's a true shame that IEM dropped QL. Putting Quake in front of people who may not necessarily have voluntarily watched/played it is the best thing to do. It's like advertising on television. Do you want necessarily want to see a commercial for McDonald's while you're watching Tosh.0? No, but you see it anyway and statistics show that it gets people thinking about and even wanting to eat McDonald's.

I run a fighting game tournament called East Coast Throwdown. 2 years ago at ECT2, we showed the Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 finals just before the Street Fighter IV finals since that's when we knew the stream would have the most viewers at any given time, as well as the most people in the room watching the stage. UMK3 is a game that's over a decade old. It was on the Super NES while it was popular in arcades. Ever since that moment, MK has ALWAYS been in the spotlight at any major tournament and it created a large interest and lead to the boom that was the MK9 community. Things take time, years even, but if the right people do the right things and never give up, it ALWAYS works out.